What’s New in Lenses 5.4

New 

AWS credentials provider chain 

Connect Lenses to AWS automatically and in a flexible way, including AWS IAM roles.

Until now, you could only connect Lenses to AWS using access keys. This has been limiting and sometimes a security anti-pattern.

Lenses now supports the AWS Default credentials provider chain. With it, you can connect via different AWS credential providers, including credentials & IAM roles assigned to the underlying EC2 instance or ECS container (a best practice).

Use it with the new setting: (in Admin > Connections > Create AWS Connection)

• Credentials Chain. With this option, Lenses will automatically pick up the AWS credentials following the rules of the provider chain.

Enhancements 

1. Kafka metrics on AWS-MSK & Jolokia 

Handle timeouts and rate limits.

Sometimes, Lenses would show errors when using Kafka broker metrics from AWS-MSK or Jolokia.

This varies depending on your Kafka setup. Some Kafka clusters take longer to report back metrics than others. With slower responses, Lenses would time out or get rate limited by the Kafka metrics APIs.

You can now tailor the Lenses behaviour to avoid that. You can allow for more time before it reports that it cannot fetch metrics from your Kafka. Adjust it with these 2 new settings: (in Admin > Connections > Kafka > Broker Metrics)

• Timeout setting. Increase it if you see your Kafka timing out sending metrics.
• Rate limiting settings. Control how Lenses recovers when the metrics APIs respond with rate limiting.

2. Protobuf support 

Improvements and advanced Protobuf features:

• Self-referencing, recursive schemas. Lenses now supports Protobuf schemas that contain self-references, recursive definitions.
• Package names. Improved handling of Protobuf package names.

3. Kafka Connect 

Improved experience in problematic situations.

• Connectors without JARs. Handle orphan connectors: connectors that are running but the underlying plugin JARs have been deleted. This causes API errors in Kafka Connect versions below 3.4 (see KAFKA-13989). Lenses recovers from both of these errors:
  • it indicates what connectors are missing JARs.
  • it uses a fallback mode for Kafka Connect below 3.4, with older APIs, and recovers.

4. License management 

• Audit integrations. See if audit integrations are enabled in the license page.
• Explicit feature support. Only features explicitly stated by the license are enabled.

5. User interface improvements 

• Connection filters. (in Admin > Connections). Make it easier to find the connection you want. You can now filter the Lenses connections by type such as e.g. Kafka, KafkaConnect, AWS.
• Connection categories. (in Admin > Connections). Find the connection categories as a new column in the connection page.

Bug Fixes 

• Pagination. Data pagination fixes on edge case scenarios.
• SQL Studio. Bug where data containing fields named update were not being displayed. This was a result of a 3rd party library bug, which has been fixed.
• Schema Registry. Bug on Schema Registry crashing the page in certain scenarios when AWS Glue schema registry is used.
• Connectors documentation. Listing page points to the latest version of the Lenses connectors documentation.
• CloudWatch alerts. Integration bug resulted from conflicting HTTP client libraries.
• LDAP. Error creating an LDAP user, introduced in 5.3 release.
• Create Connectors. Create screen validation error prevents you from creating a connector unless you do a hard page refresh.
• AWS connection. Incorrect tags format.
• HTTP request pool. The underlying HTTP request pool has been increased from 32 to 1024 to address resource exhaustion issues.
• ACL Operations. Add CREATE and ALTER operations for topics.